


in your eyes alone are many colonies of stars

by loveslandscape



Category: Carmen Sandiego (Cartoon 2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friendship, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Season 4 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28807074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveslandscape/pseuds/loveslandscape
Summary: “Somehow I doubt that. You’ll always be the most talented person I’ve ever known.”“More talented than ACME agents or VILE faculty? Than literal ninjas or history professors?”“Yeah,” Carmen says, and she means it. Her eyelids are growing heavy with sleep, and it’s a little quieter than she intends it to be when she murmurs, “They’ve got nothing on you.”After VILE collapses, Carmen keeps forging new paths, but Player remains a constant.
Relationships: Player & Carmen Sandiego | Black Sheep
Comments: 25
Kudos: 232





	in your eyes alone are many colonies of stars

**Author's Note:**

> carmen & player's friendship is so good and i WEPT when she said "you mean the world to me" to him in the finale. we stan supportive and loyal friendships. season 4 spoilers, takes place entirely post-season 4

When Carmen receives a note from Gray that’s been passed along from Chief, she reads it over and over again until her hands shake and she curls them into fists, forcing them to still. There is a conspicuous lack of contact information, only his regards and his regrets. A warm feeling blooms in her chest, the knowledge he is okay and safe and forging brighter, better paths than before, but at the same time, she thinks about how little hesitance she’d had before aiming that rod at him—and that guilt will probably haunt her forever, far more than the countless treasures she’d stolen in those six months.

“Carmen?”

She realizes she’s forgotten to turn off her earpiece—it had been off so little these past few years that it’s hard to remember to do that—and takes a deep breath. “Sorry, I zoned out. Did I miss something?”

“Nah,” Player says, the sound of his typing in the background a reassuring constant. “Wanted to check that you’re okay, that’s all.”

“I’m okay,” Carmen confirms, realizing her breath had become uneven. It’s amazing how well-attuned Player has become to her from hundreds of miles away, that he can recognize such a slight shift. “Got a letter from Gray, that’s all.”

“You want to talk to him? I’m sure I could get in touch with him if I tried, I’ve still got that alert on him so I’ll be pinged if he runs into trouble.” A beat of silence, and she can almost see Player cock his head, but she appreciates that he doesn’t ask what the letter says. “Although I doubt he’ll be running into much trouble these days.”

Gray is safe now, and that’s what’s important. Carmen exhales. “No. Thanks, though.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks,” Carmen says again. “For everything.” For the friend that hadn’t abandoned her, the one she hopes she’ll have the rest of her life.

She senses Player’s smile on the other end. “I’m not going anywhere.”

* * *

When she meets her mother, Carlotta invites her to stay for as long as she wants. Carmen’s a traveller, she’s never liked staying in one place, but this is the first time in her life she might actually have a home. There’s a lot of talking and a few tears over dinner, and then she’s offered the spare bed.

She brushes her teeth, showers, crawls into bed and stares at the ceiling. There are so many thoughts in her head and she finds she doesn’t really want to organize them. There’s no clear trajectory for them right now, no end goal she’s trying to get to. She can just _think_ , all alone in the darkness with only the pattern of the ceiling for company. 

Well. Maybe not only the ceiling. She reaches for her earpiece and turns it on.

“Red,” Player says, and she’s briefly alarmed by the sound of gunshots in the background before she picks up on their muted quality. “How’s it going?”

She laughs. “Are you playing a video game?”

“For once, I’ve got the time,” he replies, and she feels a brief pinch of guilt. It wasn’t until his brief stint in public school that Carmen had stopped to appreciate how _young_ Player was. They’d both been kids when they met, but at some point Carmen had become an adult and Player was still in high school, learning his trig tables and writing book reports. She should have allowed him more space to be a kid. “Nice to have multiple lives instead of seeing you face down real guns and worry that getting hit by an actual bullet means it’s over.”

“You know me, I’m pretty quick on my feet,” she says wryly. “How is school going? Are you going to go back to public school now that you aren’t spending your days saving the world?”

 _Pew pew,_ goes the other end. More gunshot noises, so cartoonish and different from the real thing that she wonders how she’d been alarmed in the first place. “I dunno. Didn’t really get the appeal when I was there. Plus my parents are bugging me about college apps and stuff, and I’m sure I’d be surrounded by even more talk about it if I went.”

College. That’s a weird thought. She’d asked Jules about it a few times, curious about what traditional schooling was like. Jules, while clearly passionate about her learning, had few kind things to say about the competitive nature of grad school. “College, huh? Any idea where you wanna go?”

Player groans. “Not you, too.”

“Humor me,” she says. “I don’t exactly have firsthand experience.”

“Yeah, yeah. My mom thinks with my test scores I could go to one of the elite schools in America. Like Harvard or something. I’d rather go to school close by and be done with it, if I really _have_ to go to college.”

Carmen chuckles, envisioning Player hurrying along the sunny Cambridge lawns, anxious to make it in time to his next big lecture. Not that she can envision Player anxious about much. “You could go if you wanted.”

“Harvard can’t possibly be as interesting as anything I’ve done with you,” Player says. “Bet I’m gonna be forty someday and be sad I peaked at sixteen.”

 _That’s ridiculous,_ she thinks. “Somehow I doubt that. You’ll always be the most talented person I’ve ever known.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” he fires back.

She snorts. “It’s true."

“More talented than ACME agents or VILE faculty? Than literal ninjas or history professors?”

“Yeah,” Carmen says, and she means it. Her eyelids are growing heavy with sleep, and it’s a little quieter than she intends it to be when she murmurs, “They’ve got nothing on you.”

Player sighs as a sad little _pew pew_ echoes in the background, signaling his character’s death. “Not sure this game agrees. I’ve been grinding this route for three hours and still can’t beat it.”

Carmen smiles, drifting off to the sound of his voice.

* * *

After Julia completes a case in Buenos Aires—with a little background help from the Crimson Ghost, of course, but nobody can prove anything—she takes a walk with Carmen around town. It’s nice to hang out with her, like friends do, instead of working all the time.

“Are you around here much?” Julia asks, adjusting her glasses. Carmen takes a moment to appreciate the adorable splash of freckles on her nose and cheeks. “It seems like you’re getting along with your mother well.”

“I am,” Carmen says. Sometimes she thinks her mom is everything she could have ever hoped for, but she’s lived without her for so long she doesn’t even know what she had hoped for. Suffice it to say that Carmen feels happy, safe. It’s not quite home, but it could be. “I’m staying for a while. I don’t know if it will be permanent but I’m definitely coming back often.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” They pass by a food truck, and Carmen stops, orders herself a lemonade to help with the afternoon heat. She’s fishing for some change in her pocket when she looks up, into a dark and familiar face, and her heart stops.

El Topo stares back at her over the register, his eyes wide. “Carmen Sandiego?”

Carmen hears the bill in her hand crinkle as she crushes it in her fist. Jules tenses behind her, her hand going to her pocket, probably to call for backup as soon as Carmen gives the signal. “El Topo.”

“Are things okay?” another voice calls, and it takes her a moment to place it, but the low French accent is unmistakable as Le Chèvre comes into view. Their clothing is similar, with its dark blue shades, but it’s clearly not the uniform of a VILE operative and there’s a softness to the way he stares at El Topo before he catches sight of Carmen and his eyes narrow.

“Well,” she says, cocking an eyebrow. “Hello, Goat Boy.”

“It has been a while since I was called that name,” Le Chèvre replies, drumming his fingers against the countertop. Carmen notices the way he slings an arm around El Topo, curls a hand around his hip, and how El Topo leans into the touch. “I go by Jean-Claude now.”

There’s another layer of meaning to it, one that’s not hard to catch, and Carmen relaxes as she sets her money down on the counter. El Topo’s eyebrows shoot up as he slides it into the register compartment. “Nice to meet you, Jean-Claude. I’d like to order a lemonade.”

El Topo and Le Chèvre exchange looks, some invisible language between them she can’t understand, and then El Topo ducks away to start filling up a cup. 

Le Chèvre leans on the counter, his posture open, but his arms are all wiry muscle and she bets he’s still scaling mountains. “Listen, Carmen. We hear about what happens to our old coworkers, you know. We heard about Paper Star. We do not want any part of that.”

Belatedly, Carmen remembers Jules is still there, and she manages a smile as she signals to Jules to relax. “So you and El Topo, you...run a food truck together now?”

He shrugs, his eyes becoming fond as El Topo comes over to set down Carmen’s drink on the counter. There’s a bright red straw stabbed through the lid, she notes. “When VILE crumbled, we knew all we really wanted was to stay with each other. It does not matter to us what we’re doing as long as we’re together.”

That’s not the kind of life Carmen can ever imagine leading, but she looks at the kiss Le Chèvre lays to his partner’s cheek and she thinks she understands. She takes the lemonade and nods. “Thanks for the drink, you two. See you around.”

The duo’s eyes don’t leave her back until she is long out of sight, and Jules finally breaks the silence. “Those are former VILE operatives, are they not? You don’t intend to arrest them?”

“Do you?” Carmen returns. Yes, the two of them had done terrible things, but it’s obvious they aren’t a threat and after all, Carmen doesn’t really think everyone in VILE is terrible forever. She hadn’t been, and in the end, neither had Gray.

Jules sighs as they amble down the street. “No, I suppose not. Still, we could run into them in the future on less friendly terms if VILE springs back up again.”

“Then we can deal with them then,” Carmen says, winking at Jules as she puts emphasis on the _we_ , and is pleased to see the blush that colors her cheeks.

Carmen recalls the encounter to Player later, after she’s bid Jules goodbye and is lounging in her room, and Player chuckles. “A food truck, huh? I can’t imagine you like that, Red. You always have to go off and save the world.”

“Maybe not always,” Carmen corrects as she hangs up her jacket in her closet. It’s odd, to think of all this as hers—the room, the closet, the bed she sleeps in more often than not now with her mother down the hallway. _Maybe it’ll be home,_ she thinks again. “I like to keep it a bit more lowkey nowadays. Don’t you?”

Player hums as he taps away at his keyboard. “I keep myself busy. I went back to being a white hat hacker the other day, like I was when I first found you at VILE. It’s a pretty good job.”

“Found anything interesting?”

“Not really, but my mom saw some of the code I was writing.” A long, drawn-out sigh, melodramatic for Player’s usual relaxed demeanor. “She’s making me enroll at a computer science course at a nearby community college. Says it’ll be good for my transcript, although that’s kinda tricky with homeschool anyway.”

Carmen’s lips quirk up into a smile as she opens her own computer, checking for any of the usual alerts he’s set up for her, signs of trouble happening to the friends she’s made across the world. Julia’s posted another blog article, a legitimate one not about coffee, and she clicks to read it. “Community college, huh? What’s the course?”

“Algorithms. It’s kinda cool, but it’s so theoretical,” he grumbles. “I want to be out in the _real_ world and actually using my skills, not studying graph theory.”

She laughs. “I’m sure it’ll end up useful somehow. Like all that geography knowledge—maybe it’s boring things, dull facts, but I sure thought it was useful even if it didn’t quite register with Zack.”

“Maybe,” he admits.

There’s some silence for a few minutes as Carmen reads Jules’s blog post. It’s more stuff about Coptic Egyptian; apparently, their adventure in Giza had inspired Jules to dig deeper on the subject. While a good deal of it goes over Carmen’s head, Jules does an excellent job of keeping things as accessible as possible, like any good professor should. When she finishes reading, she begins to type a comment and then pauses.

“Hey, Player,” she says, wondering if he’s still there.

He is, as always. “Yeah, what’s up?”

“What would’ve you done if I’d stayed with VILE?” she asks, thinking about El Topo and Le Chèvre—not really terrible people, she thinks, they run a food truck together now and that doesn’t exactly scream an innate evil, but for years they’d enabled evil. “If, I don’t know, I was okay with everything they’d done and kept helping them?”

“You never would’ve done that after you got your memories back, you know that. That wanting to do good is what makes you Carmen.”

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t mean when VILE brainwashed me. I mean when we first met, when I was growing up at the academy.”

A beat of silence on the other end as Player considers this. “I don’t know. I was twelve, I didn’t really have a strong conception of what was going on. But you wouldn’t have been you.”

“Yeah, wow.” _Twelve._ Carmen wonders sometimes why she hadn’t thought about that more back when she first met Player. Even then how young he was had struck her, but maybe not enough, when he was only a voice on the other end of the phone. It’d been different after she finally met him in real life, sat down to hamburgers and fries with him in an Ontario restaurant. She saw that he barely came up to her shoulder.

“Red, I can tell you’re getting lost inside your head,” he chides her. “I’ve made my choices, and I’m happy with all of them. I’ll always be happy I chose you.”

Carmen’s heart aches. In a good way, she thinks. “I know. I’m grateful for that every day.”

* * *

A few weeks later, Carmen kisses her mother goodbye on the cheek and heads down the hill, where a cab is waiting for her. She gets in and watches the buildings of Buenos Aires blur in front of her window as she taps her earpiece. “Player, you there?”

“Always,” he responds.

She frowns as she hears someone in the background ramble about Dijkstra’s algorithm. “Wait, are you in class?”

“Maybe,” he says sheepishly.

She wants to scold him, but after the amount of times she interrupted him during that one week of public school, she’d be a hypocrite. Besides, no matter how many times she says _school comes first,_ it seems to flow through one ear and out the other. She sighs. “I’ll make it quick. You got time for me to drop by?”

“Sure. When?”

“I’ll be there in about eighteen hours.”

“You don’t need me to book you a flight?”

She smiles as she double-checks her boarding pass for her gate number. “I can’t ask you to be my travel agent forever, Player. Focus on school.”

She turns off the earpiece before he can protest.

* * *

Eighteen hours and a few bags of way-too-salty airline peanuts later, Carmen hails an Uber and uncaps a bottle of overpriced water as she gets in. She takes a swallow, rinsing away the taste of bad airplane food. While her sojourns around the world to battle VILE had gotten her accustomed to long flights, her weeks with her mother had let her settle down, working on a schedule of one or two flights a week rather than every day. Maybe she’s going soft, she muses. She’ll ask to have some gym equipment ordered the next time she visits.

Player waves as she pulls up to the campus bus stop he’d asked her to pick him up from. He has his algorithms class there, and it’s nice to know he’s actually getting out sometimes instead of sitting in his room all day, staring at his screen. She’s pleased when she sees two guys standing next to him at the bus stop, both several inches taller and probably much closer to her age than his.

She gets out of the Uber and waves to him as she strides over to give him a one-armed hug. “Good to see you,” she says as he returns the hug.

The guy standing closer to him, a lanky boy with short blonde hair and a piercing in his right ear, raises an eyebrow. “Bro, _this_ is your friend?”

Player lets go and nods at the two people standing next to him. “Guys, meet R—Carmen. Carmen, these are my friends, David and Arjun.”

Arjun, a muscular Indian boy who’s a bit taller than his companion, reaches forward to offer Carmen a fistbump that she accepts. His build reminds her a bit of El Topo. “Nice to meet you, Carmen. He talks about you all the time.” When Player flushes, he laughs. “Only nice things, obviously.”

“Didn’t mention you were so cute, though,” David says, and Arjun elbows him so hard he nearly doubles over wheezing.

Carmen laughs, slinging an arm around her friend’s shoulder as the bus pulls up. “It’s nice to meet you two,” she says.

They both nod, David’s face a bit redder as he tries to regain his breath, and board the bus with cordial smiles. Carmen waits until the bus doors close and then says with a teasing smile, “You talk about me, huh?”

“Not all the time,” Player says, rolling his eyes, which gets a laugh out of her. They stroll down the street, passing several campus buildings before it morphs into restaurants and shops. “Just—stuff. Like, when Arjun mentioned he wants to go to Argentina for vacation, I was like, ‘Oh, my friend Carmen says it’s really nice.’ I don’t know, should I be keeping that info confidential? The alerts I’ve set up don’t seem to think I should be worried about anyone going after you.”

She appreciates the concern more than she can put into words, so she doesn’t try. “Nah, it’s fine. It’s good to see that you’ve made friends.”

“What can I say, maybe I get along with people in their twenties better than kids my own age,” he deadpans as they take a right and turn down the street.

They come to a little cafe that Carmen had checked on Google Maps before she chose it both because it serves good pastries and because there’s plenty of exit routes. She picks a corner booth where she can keep an eye on anyone who comes in and orders a croissant.

Player notices the way her gaze sweeps over everyone in the shop and laughs. “Red, you don’t have to worry. I can always hack into the surveillance feeds from my phone.”

He really always has her back, doesn’t he? She grins at him. “Just pick your order. I’m paying.”

“Hey, I’ll have you know I’m employed and you’re not. I can pay for myself.”

She’s already sliding out her credit card, and he sighs. “It’s not about who’s richer,” she assures him. “I want to treat my best friend, what’s wrong with that?”

“Fine, but only because a bagel here’s two dollars,” he says, good-natured as always. “How’s your mom?”

They chat for a while about Player’s classes and college applications, Shadowsan’s return to his brother’s museum, Zack and Ivy’s adventures in ACME. Player keeps tabs on the people she runs into on their adventures, partly because they both want to know that they’re okay and partly because it’s nice to hear about them. Sonia attends high school now. Xifeng starred in an opera performance in Shanghai last week. Lupe Peligro won a national wrestling championship recently, which Carmen already knew because she watches her matches on television sometimes.

Player hesitates at a lull in the conversation. “Red, do you—I don’t know—want this to be a regular thing?”

She cocks her head and asks what he means, even though she already knows.

“You went years without ever meeting me in person, and you seemed fine with that. I know what Gray did hit you hard, but you seem to have changed your mind on that for good.”

Carmen studies his face. She swears he’s gotten a little bit taller since she last met him, and somehow only now, she notices that tucked into the card holder on his phone is a college student ID. “I don’t know, Player. For those years, I didn’t think about anything but taking down VILE. It was the only thing that occupied my mind. But now I’ve got the rest of my life, don’t I?”

“The rest of your life,” Player agrees, sipping his soda, and he pauses. “I’d like it. To see you more often.”

She takes a bite of her croissant. “Maybe I could meet your parents one day.”

He grimaces. “They’re not very exciting.” Seeing the hurt flicker across her expression and her attempt to cover it up, he shakes his head. “No, no, I don’t mean it like that. I’m not trying to hide you. But you’re so exciting and vibrant and full of life. You’ve gone on all these adventures and they’re, well, a couple raising some kid in suburban Ontario.”

“ _Some kid_ who’s pretty cool himself,” she quips, and watches a reluctant smile bloom across his face. “You’ve spent all these years by my side. I want to be by yours, too.”

He laughs and pulls his laptop out of his bag. It’s plastered with stickers; maybe she should bring him some the next time she visits, a souvenir from one of her trips. “You wanna help me beat this boss fight, then?”

She says, “That boss won’t know what hit them.”

 _Ah, so this is it,_ Carmen thinks, staring at Player as he boots up his laptop. It’s not the cafe, or Ontario, or any specific place in the world, but him. _This is home._

**Author's Note:**

> title from joy harjo's "she had some horses":
> 
> "In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars  
> and other circling planet motion. [...]  
> My heart is taken by you  
> and these mornings since I am a horse running towards  
> a cracked sky where there are countless dawns  
> breaking simultaneously.  
> There are two moons on the horizon  
> and for you  
> I have broken loose."


End file.
